Dev street crashes blockchain-sponsored festivals to say it’s irrelevant to NFTs
Game developer Mark Venturelli was booked to speak at the Brazil International Games Festival on “The Future Of Video Games” before surprising participants with a speech on “Why NFTs Are A Nightmare”.
According to Venturelli, the change was clarified with the festival’s organizers in advance. However, sponsors of the festival, which included a number of NFT and blockchain companies such as Lakea and Ripio and lectures on “Web3 And The New Generation of Games”, were not as pleased.
Palestra does @markventurellicalled “O Futuro dos Videogames”, came with:
“Enganei vcs. The name of my palestra is not ‘Futuro dos Videogames’. Tive que mudar se não unprovariam.
Ovação na sala lotada. pic.twitter.com/LJH6pQAGQD
– Rique Sampaio (@RiqueSampaio) July 8, 2022
“I have heard that the sponsors were very angry,” Venturelli said PCGamer. “They tried to break into the conversation while I was talking, but the organization would not let them.”
He went on to say that those blockchain companies “are outsiders here, they are not important. They are just trying to buy their relevance, because they have no real influence over the future of our industry. If you just give them this place undisputed, you give them exactly what they want and buy their story that they are relevant. “
Venturelli’s presentation has since been posted on YouTube, with his slides translated into English (via Eurogamer), and it does a rather concise job of demystifying the world of NFTs, metavers, and games to make money.
During the presentation, Venturelli called the blockchain “a brilliant solution to the wrong problem”, claiming that a decentralized system would only allow large organizations to play the system to make money for themselves, thus making it more difficult for players to enjoy the experience. He went on to say that blockchain, and specifically games to earn games, are not innovative, as they only take existing ideas and make them worse.
It comes as one Web 3 gaming console has been announced for 2024, while a number of NFT-focused studios are emerging from experienced game developers including former PlayStation employees and the creator of Dead or alive.
And this weekend, Logan Paul announced that he allows “co-ownership” of the world’s most expensive Pokémon short through its NFT platform.
In other news, the popular gaming platform Unity has announced a “merger agreement” with Ironsource, a company that helps users scale their apps to businesses.
